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1. Block chain
The block chain is the heart of digital currencies like Bitcoin. What most don’t realise yet is that the block chain will be used for managing everything from domain names, artist royalties, escrow contracts, auctions, lotteries, etc. You can do away with middlemen whose only reason of being is making sure they keep on getting a large cut in the value chain. Unless a middlemen or governmental institution adds real value, they are in danger of being block chained into the past.2. Biometric security
A good example is the Nymi, a wearable that listens to your unique heart beat patterns and creates a unique identity. Even if people steal your Nymi, it is of no use since they need your heart to go with it.3. Deep belief networks
Deep belief networks are the reason why Google’s voice recognition is surprisingly accurate, Facebook can tag photos automagically, self-driven cars, etc.4. Smart labels
They are 1 to 3 millimetres small. They harvest electricity from their environment. They can detect people approaching within half a metre, sometimes even identify them and each product you will buy. Your microwave will not longer have to be told how to warm up a frozen meal.5. Micro-servers
A $35 Raspberry Pi 2 or Odroid is many multiples more powerful than the first Google server but the size of a credit card. Parallella is $99, same size, and almost ten times more coresP then the first Google server.6. Apps and App Stores for Smart Devices
Snappy Ubuntu Core allows developers to create apps like mobile apps but to put them on any smart device from robots & drones to wifi, hubs, industrial gateways, switches, dishwashers, sprinkler controls, etc. Software developers will be able to innovate faster and hardware can be totally repurposed in seconds. A switch can become a robot controller.7. Edge/proximity/fog clouds
Public clouds often have too much latency for certain use cases. Often connectivity loss is not tolerable. Think about security cameras. In a world where 4K quality IP cameras will become extremely cheap, you want machine learning imagine recognition to be done locally and not on the other side of the world.8. Containers and micro-services orchestration
Docker is not new but orchestrating millions of containers and handling super small micro services is still on the bleeding edge.9. Cheap personalised robots and drones
£35 buys you a robot arm in Maplin in the UK. Not really useful for major things except for educating the next generation robot makers. Robots and drones will have apps (point 6) for which personalised robots and drones are happening this year.10. Smart watches and hubs
Smart hubs know who is in the house, where they are (if you wear a phone, health wearable or smart watch), what their physical state is (heartbeat via smart watch), what your face looks like and your voice. Your smart watch will know more about you then you want relatives to know. Today Google knows a husband is getting a divorce before they do [wife searches and uses google maps]. Tomorrow your smart watch will know you are going to have a divorce before you do [heart jumped when you looked at that girl, her heartbeat went wild when you came closer].

Traditionally telecom operators subsidise the cost of broadband modems and set top boxes to get customers subscribing to their services. What if this customer premise equipment or CPE could be made a lot more innovative and go from a cost to a revenue generator?

How to generate revenue from a CPE?

What if it would be possible to put an app store in your CPE and have consumers and small and medium businesses buy apps for their CPE, just like for their mobile. Sounds as a far off thing? It is closer than you think. Thanks to Snappy Ubuntu Core it should be possible in the coming months to do just this. Developers can create Snappy Apps or Snaps and sell them through a Snap Store to consumers and businesses. The first prototypes should be on MWC in Barcelona.

Add to this that lots of functionality can be moved from the CPE to some cloud solution on the other side of the broadband network, called proximity cloud. Apps on the proximity cloud can work together with the CPEs allowing for complex content delivery networking, ad-hoc VPN and VLANs, better solutions for NAT/DHCP/etc. This should allow for lots more complex apps and as such more revenue potential, lower cost CPEs and even revenue coming from others. Proximity clouds that allow custom apps to be put on the network edges are so much more versatile than standard CDN that do generic video caching. Netflix type of companies can pay to put Netflix specific apps on the edges and pay per use. But not only the big ones can buy edge app capacity but any company. It is something that cloud providers can not easily do because their edges are a lot further away from end-users, so operators would have the advantage for once…

A couple of weeks ago we launched the open source solution to put apps and app stores on any smart device. So this is a perfect moment to talk about what the future of the Internet of Things will look like.

Hardware and Software Acceleration
Up till now you had to be a hardware and software expert to innovate in IoT. Sony is an example of a big company that is a hardware innovator but struggled to make the transition to software-driven TVs. Amazon is the example of the opposite. By separating hardware from software, the IoT revolution will accelerate and walled garden solutions that are not cutting edge in both software and hardware will suffer.

Micro-servers are the size of a credit card but at a price of a good restaurant meal and 5 to 20 times better than the first Google server. Imagine their prices dropping to $5 or even $1 at scale. Now imagine having thousands of apps for each device that is powered by a micro-server. Finally imagine this smart device talking to thousands of other devices and proximity clouds as well a public clouds. These smart devices can have gesture control, voice control, virtual reality screens, 3D vision, 4k cameras, thermal sensing, GPS, body sensors, and lots of other sensors. Backed by a virtually unlimited cloud store that can do real-time big data predictive analytics and machine learning in a distributed fashion. Thanks to Bitcoin’s block chain, distributed solutions that are not centrally controlled are possible. Docker and containers allow cloud-based IoT solutions to be continuously deployed. 3D printing will accelerate customized solutions and over time lower production costs. So enough innovations to keep everybody busy.

IoT and business innovations
Lots of companies I speak to belief that platforms and hardware will make money. The bad news is that only Foxconn type of companies will be able to make money by producing extremely large quantities at ridiculously small margins each. Platforms will be open source so only a small number will get enough adoption to make money. So how can you make money with IoT?

For now consultancy but this will fade when the market matures. An obvious alternative model is apps and app stores. The cloud offers SaaS and pay for use software models that are likely going to be successful in IoT. However the big market opportunity is about substituting obsolete reactive maintenance businesses by proactive predictive maintenance, long tail B2B and B2C service marketplaces, broker models, pay per use service models, p2p/crowd models, etc.

Lots of traditional industrial companies have business models in which machinery is sold with a medium to low margin but maintenance and optional services have extremely high margins. These margins are protected through proprietary technology. In an industrial IoT market existing infrastructure will unlikely be substituted, a.k.a brown field market. Nimble competitors will offer ways around traditional models by creating translations between proprietary systems and general purpose IoT micro-servers that can be controlled remotely.

Future use cases
Home automation will be the most visible and trendy but industrial IoT will be the money maker. Telecom operators will present lots of sim-based use cases but unless they change their way of rolling out new services, success is doubtful for most. The connected car will likely use your mobile unless data contracts become extremely cheap. Health will see lots of solutions. A new market of over-the-top health solutions will emerge in which people will get health services from medical staff that can be on the other side of the world or even provided by a computer. Security and surveillance will be one of the most widespread IoT solutions given that the price of IP cameras has come down dramatically and security solutions have become easier to use.

Drawbacks of IoT
Standards are not important. Adoption will decide what is the standard. Not a group of pseudo-experts. However unless use cases don’t have enough widespread adoption across industries, you are likely to find islands of competing standards. Making global role-outs harder.

Security is key. Nobody wants to be the company that killed through IoT. Unfortunately it will happen in the next 24-36 months because security is extremely complex and somebody will cut corners.

Privacy is becoming critical. Google knows you are getting a divorce before you. But with IoT, your smart watch and big data analytics will know about your chances of starting an affair before you even talked to the other person.

Legally there are many areas of IoT that will be extreme challenges. Bad people are good innovators because they need to stay a step before others not to get caught. Also IoT conflicts will become extremely challenging to solve when services and solutions are used from the other side of the world.

Substitution of people by machines is a worry. Lots of people are in obsolete jobs but inertia is no longer a salvation because technology commoditises very successfully. However the Internet and mobiles created millions of new jobs. It is easier to see obsolete jobs than to predict new job roles. Who would have thought that data scientists would be the sexiest job!!!

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